Gray Justice (Tom Gray 1), page 6
part #1 of Tom Gray Series
He had passed these observations on to his superiors and they had acknowledged his assessment, along with his recommendation that this was more suited to the guys at Hereford. He didn’t consider this suggestion cowardly, just the optimum way to get things done with the minimum loss of life. His unit had handled many armed sieges with great success, but they had usually been dealing with a single person trapped with nowhere to go, one person who suddenly finds themselves in a situation they never contemplated.
This was a completely different ball game.
*
The call from the Home Secretary came three minutes after the shooting, and Hammond took it in his office.
“Tell me I didn't just see a British man execute another British man, on British soil, live on the Internet,” Wells said without preamble. “The PM is livid.”
“Mr Home Secretary, I did explain that the plan to manipulate the votes wasn't guaranteed to succeed, but it was the best — no — it was the only option we had at the time.”
“And it got a man killed,” Wells shouted down the phone.
Hammond did his best to hold his own temper. “With respect, Mr Home Secretary, even if we hadn't changed the votes, the result would have been the same. The country voted for that young man to die, and I think that should concern the PM more, as it shows how out of touch he is with the electorate. At least now the PM can deflect attention from that fact, and spend the next twenty-four hours convincing the population not to sentence the next man to death.”
There was silence for a while as the Minister considered the suggestion. “I shall pass that on to the PM, but needless to say he will not want a repeat of tonight's debacle.”
The phone went dead and Hammond stared at the handset for a moment before cradling it gently. They now had no way of manipulating the votes, so he had to focus on the two main priorities. He called Harvey into his office and wasted no time when the group leader arrived.
“Double the efforts on finding that device, and find us something to pin on Gray's associates.”
Chapter 9
Monday 18th April 2011
Tom Gray woke just before five in the morning. No-one had made a move on the building and he had managed to grab some sleep just after three o’clock, although the night was far from quiet. Two of his guests had made plenty of noise at around midnight but after ignoring their muffled calls for a while he had eventually shut them up for the night with a few well-aimed blows. Stuart Boyle had also played up for a while but Gray hadn't even entered his cell: he didn’t trust himself to show any restraint and now wasn’t the time to deal with him. Mr Boyle’s day would come, but today wasn’t that day.
After checking that the boys were still with him and secure, he scanned his monitors: no sign of any movement except for up at their control vehicle, where a couple of people were standing around drinking hot drinks and looking bored. Not long to go, guys, he thought. This was well beyond their pay grade and it wouldn’t be long before the Regiment were called in to take over. It was unlikely that his former colleagues would ever launch an attack, given the consequences and the defences he had put in place, but they need to be ready, just in case the security services discovered his device. While Gray knew they would never find it, they would nevertheless be pursuing that line of investigation rigorously.
He made himself some breakfast and watched the figures on his laptop tick over as he ate. Surprisingly, the Live votes were slightly in the lead, so he checked that his countermeasures were still in place and operational. Everything seemed fine, so he ran a code comparison tool which compared the files on the South African web server with the ones on his laptop: they were exactly the same, which meant the code hadn’t been interfered with. Next he ran the duplicate email tool and that appeared to be working, too. If anyone tried to send more than one email from the same email address it would only accept the first as a valid vote: the rest would be recorded on a separate system but not included in the final vote. The same applied to IP addresses, which prevented people from using more than one email account on the same computer. Basically, it was one vote per household. His software had identified over six hundred thousand duplicate emails, which was not unexpected, given the passion some people seemed to have for what was happening.
Gray switched on the news channel and saw a representative from the leading human rights group, Liberty, denouncing his suggestions.
“...is a clear breach of Article Three of the Human Rights Act. How can giving a young person the birch not be considered torture? Article three defines any treatment which causes intense physical or mental suffering to be inhuman, and inhuman acts are defined as torture. I defy anyone to tell me that the birch does not cause intense physical suffering, not to mention the mental suffering that will inevitably go with it.”
“So how would you suggest we deal with recidivists, Ms Barker?” the newscaster asked. “As Tom Gray has pointed out, some people have criminal records as long as their arms, and the current system doesn't seem to be helping them at all.”
“It sounds like you are in favour of his reforms,” the Liberty representative said, much to Gray's amusement.
“Not at all, I'm just trying to engage in an objective debate. You say that corporal punishment is not the answer, so what alternative suggestions do Liberty have?”
Rebecca Barker was clearly annoyed at being put on the spot, and did little to hide her displeasure. “We advocate re-education and community punishments, giving something back to the areas they have affected. Beating criminals has no place in civilised society.”
Gray spotted the own goal and watched the newscaster swoop in for the kill. “Are Liberty saying that Singapore, The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia are uncivilised countries?”
“No, of course not,” Barker blushed, “but there are thirty other countries that have judicial corporal punishment and some of these are far from civilised nations.”
“Such as...?”
“Such as Zimbabwe.”
The newscaster nodded, conceding that Barker had made a good choice, but still pressed. “And of course, in Saudi Arabia, persistent thieves have their hands chopped off. This certainly makes it difficult for them to commit the same crime again, yet Tom Gray is not asking the government to go that far.”
“Yes, it might prevent a criminal from committing the same offence again, but at what cost? Given one more chance, that criminal might have changed their ways and become an upstanding member of society, but by then he has been robbed of that chance.”
“But surely the question is, how many chances does a person need? Is four enough, or seven, or should we go on giving them chance after chance indefinitely? I think Tom Gray's point is that there has to come a time when we say 'enough' and the criminal has to take full responsibility for their actions.”
Rebecca Barker was becoming flustered at not winning the argument, so she decided to draw the interview to a close. “We seem to be going round in circles here. Suffice it to say, Liberty's stance is that we strongly condemn any suggestions of reintroducing judicial corporal punishment in the UK.”
The newscaster thanked her and introduced the sports reporter, who began with yet another high-profile football manager losing his job after a run of poor results. Gray had little interest in football, so he scanned his monitors and once satisfied that no attack was imminent he prepared a dry breakfast for his guests.
Once they were fed he sat down at the monitors again and scanned the perimeter. Movement on one of the screens caught his eye: a figure emerged from the control vehicle and passed something to one of the men standing around. The man put his cup down on the step of the vehicle and started walking towards the building. Gray kept the camera on him as he closed the distance, and seventy metres from the building the man stopped and held up a large piece of cardboard. On it was written the words “Harvey calling”. Gray used the control stick for the camera to move it up and down three times, effectively letting the camera nod his understanding. The figure gave the camera a thumbs-up and Gray watched him retreat before switching his mobile phone back on. It rang within seconds.
“Hello Andrew,” Gray said.
“Hello Tom. What you did last night wasn’t a very clever move. My bosses are now under enormous pressure to resolve this problem.”
“I think it was. I think it showed people that I mean business, and it will remind your bosses what will happen if anyone tries to interfere again. Last night was just a warning, Andrew. The next time I will kill everyone in the building, including myself. That leaves you with the task of finding my device before midday on Friday, and I very much doubt you will.”
“That brings me on to my next question, Tom,” Harvey said. “How do we know you actually have a device? I believe you, but my bosses and their bosses want proof. If I can’t give it to them, they may start to think there isn’t a device at all, and that means you lose all of your bargaining power.”
In the early days of planning this mission, Gray had expected something along these lines, which was why he had forged close ties with the senior management at a research and development company, a company doing hush-hush work for the Ministry of Defence and specialising in the manufacturing of chemical “deterrents”. Having gained their confidence, he had wangled a tour of the facility on the pretence of providing an independent security assessment.
“What you're telling me is that only twenty-four hours into your search and haven't found a thing, and now you want me to hand it to you on a plate, is that right?”
“No, just some solid proof that a device exists.”
Gray thought for a moment before answering. “I expect you have been looking for a huge device, haven't you? You're thinking 'he's going to kill thousands of people, so it must be a really big bomb', aren't you? Well, you're thinking too big. Think smaller, think airborne.”
“Thanks for that, I appreciate the information, but my superiors will still want proof.”
“Fair enough. Have you heard of a company called Norden Industries?”
“Yes.”
“If you contact them they will confirm that I have made three visits to the facility.”
“Which proves nothing, I'm afraid. I know what they make there, and their stock will be audited on an almost daily basis. If anything was missing they would know about it by now.”
“Yes, I saw their audit process, and it is quite thorough in one respect. Their full canisters are checked daily, but it is a visual inspection only, and they don't audit the empty canisters. You take an empty canister, fill it with water, and on a subsequent visit you swap it with a full canister.”
Harvey considered the plausibility for a moment, then said “Okay, I'll let my superiors know.” He hung up and went straight to Hammond's office, walking in without knocking.
“John, I just spoke to Gray. I managed to get some info about his device but it needs checking out.” He shared the information he had gained and waited for Hammond's opinion, which was not long in coming.
“Go down there and see for yourself. Get them to go through the audit process and see if Gray's claim holds water. Let me know as soon as you find out so that I can tell the police to adapt their search.”
“Will do. Would you mind calling ahead to explain my visit? It should save time when I get there.”
Hammond nodded and Harvey left, grabbing his coat on his way out of the office. After picking up his car from the underground car park he drove north to join the A40 and followed it west until it became the M40. The journey to the facility in the Oxfordshire countryside took just over an hour and after showing his ID he was quickly waved through the gate. The Director of the facility was waiting for him in the reception area.
“Simon Crawford,” he said, extending his hand. Harvey shook it and introduced himself before wasting no time in explaining the reason for his visit.
“I need to witness your audit process for myself to determine if there is a weakness that might have been exploited recently. Do you have video surveillance of the storage area?”
“Yes, we digitally record it,” Crawford said as he led Harvey to the storage facility.
“How long do you keep the recordings for?”
“Thirty days, in accordance with government regulations.”
“When did Tom Gray visit the facility?” Harvey asked.
“He has been here three times. February 8th, February 26th and March 7th.”
“So his last visit was more than thirty days ago. Very convenient.”
Crawford led him to the storage wing and after passing through two layers of security Harvey was led through a door into an enormous warehouse. Looking left and right he could see over a hundred feet in each direction, and as he followed Crawford he counted off twelve rows of refrigeration units.
“How many fridges are here?” Harvey asked.
“Five hundred and fifty.” Crawford said.
“So how many canisters in total?”
“Yesterday's closing count was forty three thousand, six hundred and ten. There will have been a handful more added today.”
Harvey walked to a fridge at random and asked Crawford to demonstrate a typical audit. Crawford activated his tablet PC and brought up the stock page relating to the fridge Harvey had chosen. “There should be eighty six capsules in here,” he said, and did a swift count to confirm the amount. He then pulled out the first canister. Like all the others, it was a six-inch long cylindrical container with a valve system at the top, rather like a very small SCUBA tank, Harvey thought. It was contained within a Perspex box, and Harvey could see a label on the cylinder. Crawford pulled a pen-like device from his tablet and scanned the barcode, satisfied to see a match on the screen.
“What do you use to generate that barcode?” Harvey asked.
Crawford seemed to squirm at that question and Harvey pressed him on it. “That seems to have hit a nerve,” he said.
“Mr Gray asked me the same question, and I told him that it was standard third-party software. He suggested that these labels could easily be replicated and suggested a company which offered a barcode generator with a unique key, so that replication would be impossible.”
“And did you take his advice on board?” Harvey asked.
“I passed it along to my bosses, along with his other suggestions, and they took it under advisement,” Crawford admitted sheepishly.
“So knowing that the barcode was created using standard third-party software, Gray could easily have made his own, is that correct?”
“I suppose so,” Crawford admitted, “but what good would that do him?”
“Off the top of my head, he creates a label identical to one in these fridges. During his first or second visit he steals an empty canister and photographs a label from one of these canisters. He takes the empty canister home, fills it with water, creates the appropriate label and on a subsequent visit he switches canisters, meaning one of these canisters now contains water and Tom Gray is threatening the country with something very nasty. How does that sound?”
Crawford ran through the scenario and matched it with the current security procedures. Harvey watched as the colour drained from his face. “But how would he make the swap?” Crawford asked. “He was accompanied by a member of staff at all times.”
“A simple diversion would be my guess. Unfortunately you don't have video surveillance for any of his visits, so we can't say one way or the other that he actually managed to make a swap. With that said, I want you to take a sample from each of these canisters and make sure they contain what they should contain.”
“But that's over thirty-four thousand canisters! It will take weeks to test them all because each canister will have to be checked manually to determine the contents.”
“Can't you narrow it down to agents that will kill thousands if dispersed at altitude?”
“Mr Harvey, we don't make deodorant or perfume here. Everything in this room has that capability.”
“Then I suggest you get started,” Harvey told him. “I don't care if you have to hire extra staff and work three shifts a day, I want every canister checked. If you have any issues with this, please let me know and my boss will only be too happy to have a word with the Home Secretary and the Defence Secretary. Your career will be over before you can say 'how the fuck did I end up on the dole'.”
He walked towards the exit and had to wait for Crawford to gather himself before he joined him and took him to the facility entrance. Once outside, Harvey thought he may have been too harsh with the director of the facility. With this being a government-run facility, his hands were probably tied when it came to the budget, and he probably had request after request denied by his bosses who would then blame him for any shortcomings. This particular incident wasn't going to sit nicely with them.
Still, they were facing a crisis, and there wasn't time to play Mr Nice Guy, so he dismissed the thought and called Hammond to pass on the news. “The threat is credible,” he told his boss.
“What did he take?” Hammond asked.
“We don't know if he took anything, yet. However, if he managed to sneak out with a single canister, the results aren't going to be pretty.” He described the canisters so that Hammond could pass the information on to the Police, and then got into his car for the drive back to Thames House. A whole day had been wasted looking in the wrong places, which left just four days to search the whole country for a device the size of a can of hairspray. Needle in a haystack just didn't come close.
Chapter 10
Evan Davies climbed out of the command vehicle and went to meet the occupants of the black Land Rover which had just pulled up. He was surprised to see just two figures, the driver and passenger, emerge from the vehicle. The passenger approached and offered Davies his hand. “Major Sean Blythe and this is Sergeant Todd Dennis. We'll be taking over command of this operation.”
